We know a lot of users have moved or are thinking about moving from Classic to Elements, so we thought we’d spend a little time putting together a feature in Elements to make the transition easier!
In today’s video I demo a work-in-progress feature that imports the page structure, meta-data, resources, scripts, and more from your Classic project We stopped short of importing content as we wanted to get feedback on the work we’ve done so far.
Classic to Elements Importer
Here’s what’s supported so far:
Pages (folder names, options, but no content).
Page scripts
Meta/SEO info
Site Settings (Name, logo, etc…)
Fav Icons
Resources
Publishing Destinations
If you’ve not yet moved to Elements what’s stopping you? Would you find this import feature useful?
And don’t worry, we’ll be back later in the week to demo some of the other new features we’ve been working on for existing Element users
Now that Elements has hit the v1 milestone, now is a great time to jump in and start building your next website. Visit elementsapp.io to pick up your copy today.
Try the Elements Demo
The new trial mode in Elements lets you explore the full app and build up to three pages, giving you a feel for the design workflow and features. While export and publishing are disabled in the trial, everything else is fully functional, so you can see exactly how Elements works before committing.
It’s the best way to experience the speed and simplicity of a modern website builder. You can now Download Elements with the new trial mode.
Thanks for Your Feedback
The Elements app evolves directly from your suggestions, and as always, we’d love to hear what you think so far. Your feedback truly makes all the difference
We are a Classic user for our business and not for profit sites. A conversion tool to Elements would make the difference for us - to invest the time, etc. to learn Elements and convert.
Continuing.. We have many embedded third party elements (no pun intended) for Google sheets (Sitelok, Grid Iron for Google sheet inclusion with features, etc.). Are you working with those organizations to support them in providing Elements add ons?
Hi Dan
You say you’re not getting rid of classic but all this wreaks of to me is a move to eventualy discontinue it. I’ve tried elements and to be honest I can’t get my head around it at all. It feels in a way similar to classic with some of the settings having a different layout. I tried to rebuild part of my main website as an experiment but didn’t get very far at all. When I looked at the page in Safari, everything looked really small. Especially the controls on the video plug-in. BTW Do I have to go to Safari every time to see what the finished page looks like or am I missing something? Anyway, I will continue to use Classic mainly because Stacks is so easy to use and it only takes me a few minutes to update my website which I have to do every 2 weeks.
In general, the relentless march of technology removes drudgery from our lives (otherwise why do we put with it!?), enabling us to be more productive and more creative in the time we do have. All the migrations you’ve demonstrated are, for existing website creators, the drudgery of moving forward to a newer and better product - all the fiddly things you have to get right and remember to do the remaking a website. Making this painless is a great step forward. It removes a lot of friction from the migration process.
So, what about content? I presume that you could arrange to migrate the content of the non-stacks page plugins in Classic - and produce something similar with the components you already have or could create easily enough. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but good enough to tinker with rather than have to perform major surgery on. I guess non-stacks pages might be a minority interest where the law of diminishing returns (for you) sets in, but I sense that there might be quite a few “simple” sites out there that don’t rely on the stacks plugin. You could make it an almost entirely painless process for this audience.
As far as stacks pages are concerned, I think we all understand that stacks, in general, can’t easily be converted to components in Elements, but a skeleton of named placeholder components following the hierarchy and naming of stacks would be very helpful as a “starter-for-ten”, and where the stacks are simple and basic (e.g titles, paras, images, n-column layouts etc) you could probably make a good stab at migrating their content too (with some assumptions about styling, layout, etc).
I think this might also encourage the developers of more esoteric stacks to provide alternative “templates” for Elements since it is not encouraging creators to throw away all their page structure and content and start again from scratch. Some may feel it is time to do that and embrace the new technology, but there will be many others who don’t want to or cannot afford to.
Hi, I personally would not use this as Elements is a good opportunity to rebuild sites without any previous ‘history’ and inbuilt issues that I know about but have never addressed.
However for RealMac Software I think this is essential as a way to bring over RWC users, go for it!
This is a fantastic feature. I recently switched from Classics to Elements, and importing sites from Classics would be a huge help in bridging the steep learning curve of Elements for me. Keep up the good work!
Just a couple of notes on the import tool for Rapiweaver Classic/Stacks to Elements:
This feature already preserves many potential SEO details, as it brings over the important meta and structural data—though not the raw text.
Even as it stands, this allows a user to bring their website up to current, more efficient code without having to do all the “detail” work (see point 1 above). It’s just a matter of rebuilding the text, image, and other component containers, then copying and pasting the visual content over. Are the image URLs copied and placed where they belong?
With thousands of stacks out there, is it even realistic to build an import filter that converts them to Elements? And if so, is this the best use of the team’s time? Perhaps it’s necessary to capture the Classic/Stacks user base.
It’s an interesting experiment, to say the least. For me, it’s useful because I don’t usually do anything too complex with my websites—just straightforward informational sites, no stores or databases to manage.
Well done, even if I’m not sure how it translates for others.
Size of website and graphics FINALLY looks correct. (on all machines)
Do you really need all of those stacks?
I had a long hard look - pick your top ten stacks that you use all the time..
Are they replicated in Elements?
I had to say yes…
It was pretty fast, when you get the hang of things to port over 15 sites
Some - ‘extras’ - can be added via HTML sections for those features as needed.
One you create ‘master page’ with globals - it’s simply a matter of duplication, then copying and paste from classic to elements - really simple.
Dear Dan,
I still use in my iMac (late 2012) the masOS Catalina, and Elements doesn’t work in it.
How to solve this problem?
I am an old user of Rapidweaver …
Yours,
Mauricio Galinkin
Brasilia, Brazil
I think this is going to be very useful for some people. For me I might have used it if it had been available, but I took the opportunity instead to rebuild my sites from scratch because Elements gave me the chance to upgrade them in significant ways over Classic/Stacks.
I have never regretted making the switch and it is now painful going back to Classic to retrieve some information I might need on the newer sites.
@dan This is perfect!!! I wouldn’t want to import anymore than this anyway. I plan to use my migrations as an opportunity to rebuild and improve the page elements themselves. This import would save a lot of the tedious work that comes with a migration. I could get straight to work on the fun stuff Only downside for me is most of my RW sites use the SEO Helper stack, so all that info wouldn’t be migrated.
My main hesitation was the inability to migrate existing RW sites into Elements. I bought Elements anyway and I tried rebuilding a website. After a few hits and misses so far it’s going pretty well. The ability to migrate the resources would have been a big help, as would being able to have the folder structure would available too.
I finally had an aha moment where Elements made sense, and now creating a website is much easier. Hopefully there will be more components in the future as I am not an expert in HTML or CSS. Definitely add the Import function!
I doubt there’s anything Dan and the team can bring to the table here. You can’t expect to have new Software running on a 13 year old Mac. Guess it’s time for some new hardware.
We stopped short of importing content as we wanted to get feedback on the work we’ve done so far.
Thanks for Your Feedback
Only downside for me is most of my RW sites use the SEO Helper stack, so all that info wouldn’t be migrated.